HopkinsCinemAddicts

Kenny's Power

    Eastbound & Down ends in two weeks.  On April 8th at 10:30 pm, the final "chapter"--not episode, chapter--of HBO's antiheroic saga of Kenny Powers will somehow just stop.  I am at once delighted to see how KP will turn failure into triumph one last time, and utterly crushed to see him drop the mic and walk off the stage forever.

    My fondest memory of Kenny dates back to the show's first season.  While employed as a middle school P.E. teacher (from my childhood experience, I cannot imagine a less respectable job) after falling from Major League Baseball grace, Kenny pops a pill of Ecstasy before chaperoning a school dance.  Sporting all black down to his signature cowboy boots, he pushes his way into a dance circle comprised solely of preteens and prepares to woo his long-lost high school girlfriend, now the middle school art teacher.  "Work, drugs," he demands calmly.  Then he dances.  Then he throws up. But damn if those drugs didn't work just like he told them to--I haven't seen a portly man move like that since Bluto floated up the stairs to the Dean's office in Animal House.

    This season, KP managed to sum himself up in one perfect admission when he said to his categorically apathetic college-age girlfriend, "You think I f***in' wanna hang out with my f***in' son?  Hell no, I'd much rather be doin' cocaine and watchin' the Saw DVDs in your dorm room with ya."  He's a ladies' man and a man's man; he's a lover and a fighter; in the words of Kenny Powers, Kenny Powers is "a god damn champion."

    With ambition as unstoppable as the soundtrack that accompanies him, KP has suffered through, run away from and finally returned to face a slew of potentially career- and life-ending struggles since we met him in 2009.  And why have we been with him from the very beginning?  Because he is unbelievably entertaining. He says the most ridiculous things so often and just keeps talking until there are no more boundaries for him to cross; we have no choice but to accept how beautifully hilarious he is and forget the decorum we use to direct our own speech.  He amuses, yet inspires us with perfectly serious and accidentally revealing monologues.  He endears himself to us with the occasional poignant plea for the simple human necessities of companionship and a sense of belonging. He is at once a martyr for absurd humor and a touching failure of a train wreck whom we are shocked to care about.  He is a figure unlike any other on television: always foul, often wrong but sometimes right, Kenny Powers is the low-class American wannabe who gets by--just barely--because of his heart.

    I will be very sad to say goodbye to KP, to the raucous laughs and the Schadenfreude his misfortune and mess-ups afforded.  Perhaps I'll find a new hero to follow each week, but for now I pledge allegiance to Kenny Powers and leave you with his words rather than mine:

"In closing, I'd like to give big ups to God, Buddha, L. Ron, whoever.  Hell, maybe I just need to thank me.  If there's one thing I've learned through all my adventures and conquests, it's that some people are just wired for success.  I had no choice when it came to being great.  I just am great.  I'm not trying to sound cocky or full of myself, but Kenny Powers has a sneaking suspicion that no matter what comes his way he will always be great.  Because that's just the way s*** works sometimes.  This has been based on a true story.  The motherf***in' end."

 

From a Whisper to a Scream: On the Artaudian Cruelty of LA PIANISTE

Emerging from her “cage” at the Vienna Conservatory, Erika Kohut now enters a prison of a different make: the apartment she owns with her mother. They have a confrontation over what forty-something Erika has done earlier in the night – namely shopping for frivolous clothing – and hair-pulling and ugly histrionics ensue before mother and daughter reconcile to take their nightly place in the bed they share. In this title sequence, director Michael Haneke presents the microcosm of their relationship, bipolar and incestuous in all but deed. Adapted from the novel by Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek, La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher) carries the fragrance of an old novel, but the film's motifs of ritualized sexual violence and voyeurism come across as a contrarian gesture. Marrying the contemporary and classic in an incisive study of brutalized passions, Haneke explores man's urge to direct his own suffering.

Isabelle Huppert inhabits the eponymous part of Erika, a woman whose personal and professional lives are thoroughly dedicated to control and the pursuit of perfection. Huppert has a history of playing self-contained women and here she is in fine form as a Viennese specimen of severity whose transgressive desires seethe underneath a mask of icy poise. Operating on the principles of classical tragedy, Haneke paints two distinct and opposing artistic tendencies within her, worrying the tension between the chic and the abject.^[1]

The film chronicles her suffering, which begins with small acts of rebellion in the form of sexual compulsions. Erika's identity is fractured by disparate roles; At home, she simultaneously plays the infantilized daughter and the surrogate husband for her mother. Outside of her conservatory and home, she is a lurker, a voyeur with latent violence directed towards others and herself. Indeed, Erika is something rarely seen in cinema - a beautiful female pervert. This uncomfortable tension is acknowledged even within the film, at a sex shop on one of Erika's furtive excursions where her very presence disturbs and shames the male customers and breaks them out of the fantasy. Erika is seemingly repulsed by her femaleness, cutting her sex as a hobby. Thankfully Haneke doesn't predicate our empathy on the provision of backstory. One simply reacts to the shocking but plaintive truths of what she's doing and to the questions of why or why not. The character cannot be so easily consumed by the viewer, who must activate his or her fantasy in the detangling of her motivations. It is not clear, for example, whether Erika, the middle aged piano teacher, has fallen below expectations of fame and fortune because she lacks the talent or because she has purposely thwarted her ambitions out of spite for her mother. One does get the sense her artistic drive has curdled when she browbeats her admiring students. Her self-loathing in this respect perhaps manifests most clearly in a subplot where she sabotages the potential career of a female student with an equally domineering mother.

Haneke, in his infinite perversity, sets up the love triangle between Erika, her mother, and the rakish student, Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel). While Walter's eagerness provokes Erika, Freudian principles of transference help explain why Erika cannot feel or respond to the latter's conventional expressions of love.^[2] He even changes a public performance of a Schönberg piece to one of Schubert's just to impress her (and that is quite a difference – jumping from the Modern discordance to Romanticism).^[3] Walter pursues her ardently, initiating a game of seduction meanwhile failing to (or refusing to) recognize her bizarre symptoms of illness. For an instant he is a paragon of mythic muscularity, the white knight to liberate the repressed heroine but, alas, the film is decidedly anti-love.

For Erika has an uncompromising idea of love, in which art is to be confused with real life. Music is the predominant metaphor for love in the film, and the recurring scenes in which Erika gives rigorously precise note-by-note analysis of a piece of music serve as reminders of the fact. Walter, while attractive to her, is not the perfect lover because he does not play music they way she expects, which is to say with complete dedication to the art. Walter uses music to seduce Erika, who does not want to be seduced and possessed in the same way she is possessed by her mother. Her rigid rules for sexuality in turn convey the Romantic paradox of applying Apollonian order to Dionysian emotions. “Feelings won't defeat my intelligence,” Erika states to Walter after an unconsummated sexual encounter. Later she gives Walter explicit “instructions” by letter expressing her desires to be beaten and gagged. Alternatively infuriated and disgusted, Walter is curious enough to keep playing. Subtextually, Erika controls Walter's pleasure in the same way the director controls the emotions of the viewer. Haneke is a formalist and he shoots meticulously, so his presence is felt less in the stationary camerawork and more in the actions of the characters. Haneke identifies with Erika and projects those active, masculine characteristics onto her, but Haneke does not turn her into feminist statement. Erika is not so much aware of her behavior as she is reacting defensively to protect her selfhood.

When Erika's wishes are granted in the traumatic climax, the scene is devoid of sexual gratification. Walter's transformation from the precocious admirer to the abusive savage is shocking. “Not as you imagined?” Walter mercilessly posits, and with this statement Haneke seemingly implicates the viewer seeking vicarious thrills from a movie about sadomasochism.

In the end, life goes on and the contemptuous young man abandons the broken older woman as the viewer similarly walks away from the film. With Huppert's indelible parting look of agony and her final tragic gesture, Haneke draws back the curtain over his theatre of cruelty.

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[1] Refer to the Apollonian-Dionysian axis. " Fredrich Nietsche, Raymond Guess, Nietsche: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Cambridge: University Press, 1999.

[2] Freud describes transference as "...re-experiencing emotional relations which had their origin in…earliest object-attachments during the repressed period of…childhood." Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989.

[3] For curious minds, the two pieces in question are Schönberg's Opus 33b and Schubert's Scherzo from the Sonata in A Major.

Image courtesy of the author.

Black Swan and the Hazards of Female Autonomy

In many ways, Aronfsky’s award-winning Black Swan is a film about femininity and repressed womanhood. Following the struggles of Nina Sayers, played by Natalie Portman, to master the lead role in Swan Lake, Black Swan focuses on the pressure on women not only to reach perfection but to be perfect. In this respect the film’s message is clear. This pressure is destructive, leading to the main character’s breakdown and ostensible suicide.

When it comes to more nuanced notions of gender and repression, however, Black Swan becomes much more thematically murky. For purposes of this post, I will focus on the issues of female adulthood, independence, and sexuality in our protagonist, Nina. Through its depiction of her journey to self-destruction, Black Swan delivers the clear message that a free woman is a dangerous woman, perhaps less miserable than the trapped girl but certainly more devastating.

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The primary female influence on Nina is her mother, Erica Sayers, played by Barbara Hershey. A failed ballerina who gave up her career for her daughter, Erica lives vicariously through Nina. At the same time, Erica keeps her daughter in a consistently infantile state. Nina’s room is pink and filled with stuffed animals, and her bedroom door is perpetually open. When Nina gets the lead role in Swan Lake, her mother buys her a cake and, after Nina refuses a large piece, almost throws the whole thing out. The proper balance is restored only when Nina relents, if only a little, and Erica feeds Nina some frosting off the tip of her finger as one might to a baby or a pet. Even Nina’s sexuality is strictly corralled. Erica sometimes spends the night in her daughter’s room, explicitly preventing Nina from exploring that part of herself. This mother-daughter relationship, clearly, is not a healthy one, and it is one that explicitly keeps Nina from entering into adulthood, much less taking control of it.

This is the Nina we have at the start of Black Swan, a young woman trapped in a child trapped in a woman’s body, and this is the Nina who is perfect for the innocent White Swan but not so for the dark and sensual Black Swan. This is the woman the head of the ballet company, Vincent Cassel’s Thomas Leroy, casts as the Swan Queen.

When we first meet Thomas, he is stalking through a room of ballerinas, appraising them, touching them as a mark of who gets to audition for the Swan Queen and who does not. This scene oozes male dominance, male ownership, over the female, and this impression is affirmed when Nina visits his office in order to ask for the role. She knows to do her hair and put on lipstick, to put on a sexualized feminine presentation. And Thomas notices, Thomas points it out, and Thomas grabs her and kisses her.

To the film’s credit, this scene is portrayed as the assault it is, and when she bites him and runs away we see his behavior as horrifying, sexist, and unfair. Nina’s talent should win her this role, not Thomas’s decision to take sexual advantage of an employee.

But it is this scene—or, more accurately, her willingness to fight in a sexually aggressive situation—that lands Nina the part.

Repeatedly, what can be described most accurately as sexual harassment or all-out assault from Thomas is depicted as disturbing but overwhelmingly necessary or justified, not only to get ahead in the ballet industry but also for Nina’s personal growth. Intrusive questions about Nina’s sexual habits, an order to masturbate, and even a physical seduction are Thomas’s methods for teaching Nina to become the Black Swan, and this harassment sparks Nina’s sexual awakening. Nina even develops feelings for Thomas. Repeatedly the film tells us that Nina is repressed, infantilized, shut in by herself and her surroundings, and while Thomas is certainly not the good guy for what he does, his role as sexual gatekeeper blurs what should be a morally clear-cut issue. It’s no coincidence that the director states, “That whole scene with Natalie when he tells her to go touch herself, it's really not that out of line” (Source). For the director and for the film it isn’t, because the end product is justified by the means.

The product here being a woman crafted into the perfect Swan Queen, the means an aggressive male authority figure forcing his sexuality on a female employee, something the rest of us might call a crime.

One must be careful, however, to note that Nina’s sexuality is not depicted as a particularly good thing. In keeping with tradition, the dark and even the murderous are sexual in Black Swan. Perhaps because that which is repressed must be released in an equally violent manner, Nina’s sexuality is destructive and a marker of her own moral degradation. Her growing independence is treated in a similar manner, and develops alongside this sexuality.

Take Mila Kunis’s Lily, the embodiment of everything Nina has buried deep inside her. Free in her dance, in her consumption, in her speech, in her manners, in her sex, Lily acts as Nina’s foil, both for the character and for the audience. She is also the one to lead Nina into autonomy, especially sexual autonomy, first by a visit to a club and then through oral sex. Lily literally takes Nina away from the controlled environment of her mother’s apartment, but even then, she spikes Nina’s drink. This free spirit is deceitful and dangerously so, and as Nina becomes more and more confident and sexually aggressive, performing a mind-blowing performance as the Black Swan and kissing Thomas in front of the other dancers, she becomes more violent and morally questionable, killing “Lily”/herself and attempting to cover up the crime.

Also notable is that, during their sex scene, Nina is not actually with Lily but with the dark version of herself, Lily simply a hallucination. (I could go into the theme of female homosexuality as something dark, forbidden, wrong, and tantalizing here, but that’s a topic for another post.) After reaching orgasm, Nina is literally smothered by her own doppelganger, this sexual release leading to a sort of breakdown and death.

By repressing all of these aspects of her adulthood and womanhood, what could be healthy is blown up to unhealthy extremes—one can’t help but wonder, though, just what would healthy extremes be? In Black Swan we only see unhealthy femininity, unhealthy sexuality, unhealthy womanhood. Healthy limits are never defined, and it is in fact left questionable whether these even exist, especially for women.

By the end of the film, Nina can be considered an independent actor. She has broken away from her mother and calmly convinced Thomas to give her the role of the Swan Queen. She has even gained control of her own sexuality, as seen in her kiss of Thomas. At the same time, however, we have actually seen her physical metamorphosis into the Black Swan—a hallucination or delusion, perhaps, but no less a symbol of transformation into something dark and unnatural. After all, escaping her mother involved breaking her mother’s hand. The relationship with Thomas was never a healthy one, and so even this expression of her desires is darkened. Perhaps most importantly, reaching this stage in her adulthood has literally cost Nina her moral and physical life. In order to keep the part of the Swan Queen Nina has committed murder, if only in her mind, and in actuality she has stabbed herself.

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In Black Swan, we follow what is in many ways a coming of age tale. Nina, a sexually innocent young woman, is infantilized by her mother and surrounded by figures of an aggressive and developed sexuality, and in order to play the role of the Black Swan, she must force herself to grow up, and she must do so quickly. At every stage of this process, however, she is either revictimized or must victimize others, including herself, in order to reach any sort of autonomy. It is tempting to read this negative portrayal as a scathing criticism of a sexist culture, but there is scarce evidence for such a reading; not in a world where even Lily, the closest thing Nina has to a friend and the film to a positive portrayal of female sexual independence, is cruel enough to spike Nina’s drink in a club. If this is how friends help friends, I’d hate to see how they hurt each other.

Black Swan is a fairy tale of broken womanhood. It is a world where mothers are wicked and little girls might be unhappy at home but at least they’re not stabbing themselves with broken glass. Black Swan is a world where women can’t win and not necessarily because of their circumstances, a world where men hurt women and this is bad, yes, but to some extent justified because it seems there is something fundamentally twisted about female sexuality anyway.

It is a world where, the moment you let the women free, they’re more than capable of destroying themselves.

Acting on Impulse vs. Respecting Tradition: Complicated Courtship in Jaffa and Lemon Tree

           The female protagonists in Jaffa (2009) and Lemon Tree (2008) may differ in terms of religion, ethnicity and age, but both women have something in common: major obstacles stand in the way of their desired relationships. In the case of Jaffa, religion and ethnicity prevent Mali, a young Jewish woman, from marrying her Palestinian boyfriend.  In Lemon Tree, age differences and marital standing are significant hurdles separating 40-something widow Salma from her 30-something lawyer, Ziad. While both movies explore the subject of complicated courtship, Jaffa and Lemon Tree employ different filmic techniques to reveal how severe the obstacles are that affect each relationship.  

            Lemon Tree makes use costumes and props to explore the changing nature of the relationship between Salma and Ziad. At the beginning of the film, Salma dresses in a very conservative manner. She wears long, dumpy dresses and a headscarf. After all, Salma seeks Ziad’s legal assistance for a very serious purpose: her neighbor, the Defense Minister of Israeli, has ordered that Salma’s lemon grove be cut down in order to prevent terrorists from attacking his house from Salma’s orchard. The Palestinian woman inherited the grove from her late father and will not allow her trees to be cut down. Needless to say, Salma’s first meeting with Ziad is as unromantic as it gets.

            The lawyer’s desk is covered with stacks of paper; he eats slimy sardines from a can and offers Salma a taste. The woman politely declines. However, the lengthy takes during the shot/reverse/shot sequence between them suggest that the widow and the lawyer are intrigued by one another. As the film progresses, costume choices reveal how the two grow closer. One night after they’ve had a few meetings, Ziad knocks on her door when soldiers won’t let him back into town due to a curfew restriction. The nightgown-clad Salma realizes that Ziad is at the door and purposefully decides not to wear her headscarf.

             Her decision not only defies cultural norms, but also it suggests her growing sense of intimacy with Ziad. The two are repeatedly featured in medium shots during the scene, a technique that displays them as a unit separate from the outside world. The close-up of Ziad stroking Salma’s hand proves that their relationship is at its peak. Later in the film, Salma is shown applying lipstick and adjusting her fashionable and brightly-colored attire. Her stylish appearance signals her desire to have Ziad find her attractive. The young lawyer clearly takes notice of her efforts when he checks out her courtroom attire and says: “You look stunning. Enough to drive a guy crazy.”

            While costumes showcase Salma and Ziad’s growing interest in one another, the use of photographs in the film emphasizes the obstacles standing in their way. A large picture of Salma’s disgruntled-looking late husband stares Ziad down everytime the lawyer enters the widow’s home. Close-ups of photos in Ziad’s office of his wife and daughter from Moscow emphasize where the man’s loyalty should lie. Finally, Salma’s act of burning a newspaper clipping of Ziad’s engagement to another woman is significant. The older woman decides to remain a respected widow rather than engage in a torrid affair with a fickle attorney.

            Though Jaffa also makes use of costumes and props to comment on the nature of a relationship, this film especially takes advantage of editing and cinematography to showcase the obstacles the potential partners face. Whereas Salma and Ziad often appear in the same shots in Lemon Tree, Mali and Toufik are usually positioned in separate shots. Shot/reverse/shot patterns suggest a great divide exists between them. The on-going conflict between Jews and Arabs is so severe that Mali and Toufik have more difficulty escaping into their own universe than Salma and Ziad do in Lemon Tree. Extreme close-ups on the two farewell letters that Mali writes during the film emphasize the controversial nature of the young lovers’ relationship. In order to keep her family, Mali must shatter her relationship with Toufik. In order to be with Toufik, Mali must give up her family. The extreme close-up on the approval letter for Mali’s abortion puts into perspective the intense decisions the young woman must make as she chooses between her soul mate and her parents.  

            Costumes and props also suggest the divisive nature of Mali’s relationship. The two duffel bags initially serve as a symbol of hope for the couple. Mali’s face is glowing as she packs her bag; she smiles as she clutches a white dress that she’ll presumably wear on her wedding day. However, the fact that the only place to hide the packed duffel bags is under the filthy mattress in a side room of the father’s car shop hints that Mali’s elopement won’t be easy or glamorous. Not surprisingly, the duffel bags eventually symbolize lost opportunities. When Mali must hide the evidence that she and Toufik tried to run away, the young woman has no other option but to chuck the bags into a dumpster.

           However, when Toufik contacts Mali again after his prison stint, it becomes clear that the now-thirty year-old woman misses her childhood love. Camerawork reveals Mali’s desire to see Toufik again. The woman is positioned in a medium shot with her back to the camera as she speaks to Toufik on the phone while they plan a meeting place. That Mali is turned away from both her parents and viewers suggests that the single mom is ready to act on her own impulses and finally stand up to her parents.

Framing Disconnection: Half Nelson

There’s little breathing room in Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson.  Daniel Dunne, a drug addicted inner city history teacher, is a character caught in a position he’s unable to break free from (as the title suggests).  The source of this, or what it is specifically, is never entirely clear; does it refer to his inability to change and the sense of stasis his character is perpetually stuck in, his growing disillusionment despite his genuine optimism and passion for teaching, or to how his character seems caught between worlds politically, socially, and economically?  Is it the cause or the result of his addiction?  The film’s visuals help to establish this, primarily framing the figures individually and in close-ups.  It is in this way that Fleck is able to capture his character’s sense of confinement, the feeling that he’s cramped or trapped both internally and within the tight confines of the frame.  Fleck thus establishes boundaries for Dan through the film’s cinematography that only drugs seem able to alleviate.  The strong use of close-ups and individual framing not only serves to establish Dan’s feelings of confinement and restriction, but illustrates the way he (and thus the addict in general) feels cut off, separated from those around him.  It is this feeling, this sense of disconnection that Dan’s character not only seems to struggle most with in the film, but that is ultimately changed through the unlikely bond he forms with one of his students.

           "A Half-Nelson.  One of Its Many Applications", Creative Commons[1]

Unlike other film’s on the subject (such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Blow), Half Nelson’s focus isn’t so much on the exoticism or romanticism of drugs and the addict, the world that surrounds drugs and drug dealing, or the drug experience itself, but instead on how drugs shape Dan’s social interactions and the way he relates (or doesn’t relate) to those around him.  The different drugs he uses throughout the film seem to allow him to momentarily step outside that sense of confinement and suffocation, those isolating boundaries that disconnect him from other people.  Six minutes into the film, Fleck shows us as Dan drops a straw (for snorting cocaine) onto his coffee table, cutting away before we see the drugs or him using.  In the scene that follows, Dan goes to a bar where he meets two women.  They enter the cramped frame with him as they dance.  By keeping the camera close to the characters, focusing on the movement of their bodies, Fleck establishes a certain connection between the three.  He then cuts from the dance floor to the bathroom, as one woman passes cocaine to the other.  They discuss their love for Oprah while Dan, his high presumably subsided, tries to explain how he “fucks things up just to fuck them up.”  Despite the small space of the bathroom and how the three figures are positioned in close proximity to each other, Fleck portrays their conversation almost entirely through close-ups.  The connection between them has been broken.  Unlike before where all three were squeezed into one frame here they are separate, with Dan cutoff from the other two.  Their dialogue reflects this growing sense of disconnection as well.  Similar to his other social interactions in the film (such as with his family, with the other teachers, and with the other girl he meets in the same bar later on) there is a breakdown in communication; the two talk over Dan, they don’t respond to what he’s saying, and they finish his sentences incorrectly.

As the conversation progressively falls apart, Dan leans over and kisses them.  As he does so, the camera follows him, briefly capturing each girl’s face in the frame before settling on Dan again in his original position.  He reaches out here, trying to make a connection, and yet, like his other attempts in the film, it ultimately fails.  His character thus expresses a desire to connect with other people yet the inability to do so sober.  As Dan is speaking the two girls interrupt him, deciding to return to the dance floor.  We don’t see them as they say this; instead, the camera stays focused on Dan as he finishes his cigarette and watches them leave.  For much of the film, the camera will stay on Dan as the action takes place around him, the focus being not so much on what physically happens in the scene, but instead on how he responds to the action and relates to the people he encounters.  We sit and watch as Dan’s figure, alone and smoking what’s left of his cigarette, recognizes the moment as another connection lost.

     Half Nelson Poster, Creative Commons[2]

Drey, a 13-year-old black student in Dan’s class, is the only figure in the film he establishes any sort of connection with; what this connection and what the nature of their relationship are the two themselves have trouble defining.  It is Drey’s character though who seems able to break these boundaries of his character  and in the film’s cinematography.  She is the only figure consistently shot in the frame with Dan and in a wide-angle.  The wide-angle and long shots in the film serve to establish the connection between the two, forcing us to look at them in relation to each other, to think of them as a pair. 

When Dan smokes inside a bathroom stall of the girl’s locker room the camera stays tight on his face (as it does for much of the film), shifting in and out of focus.  The tension, power, and significance of this moment though is not in showing Dan as he gets high (one of the few times we see him in the process) but instead in what follows.  When Drey discovers him inside the stall, crack pipe and lighter still in hand, a certain bond is formed between the two that will act as the driving force behind the film.  The final shot of the scene is a wide-angle (the first wide-angle of the two characters in the film); although the camera has moved back here, Fleck continues to limit his characters’ space, making them appear, similar to the close-ups, trapped inside the frame.  He uses the walls and doorway of the bathroom to frame the two, cutting off two-thirds of the screen.  The bathroom stalls then take up two-thirds of the open doorway, thus cramping their figures into an even smaller area in which they can interact.  The power of the shot, though, lies in what happens in this small space.  Drey’s figure kneels over Dan as he lies on the bathroom floor, his hand holding hers as she presses a wet paper towel to his forehead.  Although the close-up is generally used for the more intimate moments in a film or as a way to convey something emotional to the viewer, Fleck here uses the wide-angle.  It’s after this experience that the camera leaves Dan and shifts to Drey and Drey’s story; their stories intertwining as she becomes the second half of the narrative.  For the remainder of the film, the two characters will be thought of only in relation to each other; even when they aren’t pictured together, or when Fleck crosscuts between them, they still seem present in their absence.  As both characters learn throughout the film, this bond, this connection is complex; it challenges and blurs their roles as student and teacher, child and adult. Drey’s role in the film is never as a tool for Dan to overcome his addiction (that isn’t Fleck’s intention), but instead as a figure that Dan connects with, that pushes him to recognize and understand the direct and indirect effects of his addiction.  Like Dan and Drey, we too are never entirely sure of how to define their relationship, and Fleck doesn’t seem to want us to.  Instead, what’s important to see is how this experience breaks the isolating boundaries of the close-up, forming a bond that brings them together.  Although Dan still appears confined within the screen, trapped in his half nelson, he is no longer alone; Drey has joined him inside the frame. 

 

Photo Credits:

1. Creative Commons, <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Burns_Half-nelson.jpg>

2. Creative Commons, "P373" (Flickr) <flickr.com/photos/ 49503116561@N01/251634787>

Currently Watching: Alice (Svankmajer, 1988), Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-wai, 1995), Gonzo (Gibney, 2008), Edvard Munch (Watkins, 1974), Scratch (Pray, 2001), PCU (Bochner, 1994), Vive le Tour (Malle, 1962), Next Friday (Carr, 2000), Frenzy (Hitchcock, 1972), The Secret of the Kells (Moore and Twomey, 2009)

Stereotypical but not typical

Precious follows Claireece "Precious" Jones, an obese, illiterate 16 year-old in 1987 Harlem. She is kicked out from school for getting pregnant the second time (both times by her father) and at home, is abused by her tyrannical mother, Mary (Mo’nique). Her life starts to turn when Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), her GED instructor, and Mrs. Weiss (Mariah Carey), a social worker, help her transition out of abuse and illiteracy, yet not beyond the entrenched boundaries of poverty and HIV.

“Mariah Carey and Mo’nique are in it? And Tyer Perry’s producing it?” My friend saw a still of Precious and assumed it was a comedy.

When names like Mariah Carey, Tyler Perry and Oprah, who co-produced the film, are being mentioned, it certainly doesn’t evoke impressions of spellbinding acting, seriousness or poverty, respectively. Additionally, because the premise of Precious is already incredibly dramatic, it predisposes the film to be judged and criticized before it’s been seen. But descriptions like “poverty porn,” “stereotypical,” and “Lifetime-y,” are unoriginal presumptions that overlook the film’s idiosyncrasies.²

Watch before you judge: serious and Mariah Carey unite impressively well in Precious. Flickr Creative Commons.1

Viewers will be afraid to blink throughout the film or will cover their eyes completely because director Lee Daniels will engage you by making you feel uncomfortable. The camera in Precious is rarely completely still, even when attending still scenes: this perpetuates the underlying vigilance and instability that characterized 1980’s Harlem. Contrastingly, Precious is stoic and stagnant: she hesitates to speak and readily accepts abuse. Her appearance may suggest otherwise, but she's inhibited and defenseless, handicapped by years of trauma. It is through this presentation, a perspective only film can provide, we can begin to sympathize with Precious, the girl who symbolizes every one of America’s problems.

And abandoning our preconceptions is easy for a film this unique: nothing is unnecessarily sensationalized because nothing needs to be. Precious herself may be a 350-pound cliché (especially as she steals fried chicken and craves McDonald's) but the film’s approach to New York’s social injustice is surprisingly stark and believable. Guns, drugs and male aggression are ignored. The film instead spotlights exclusively on minority women and depicts the most pervasive kinds of violence: domestic, sexual and worst of all, unreported. It’s startling just to see Mary talk: Mo’nique revealed she was portraying her own abuser from childhood, and the camerawork complements her intensity with frequent close-ups, shots from Precious’s colossal yet vulnerable point of view, and cut-ins of hand gestures (which reveal a lot about internal state).³

Consequently, Daniels’ discreet portrayal paints a New York City darker than what we’re used to: he reveals endemic issues that can’t be solved valiantly or temporarily as they can be in Martin Scorsese’s films or Slumdog Millionaire. Precious may be one of the most painful films of the year because it concentrates on familiar social problems resolved by acquiescence, not fairy-tale endings.

"Bittersweet" is a fitting oxymoron to describe general reaction: it's that sad film you love because it makes you cry. And maybe because it’s that time of the year, an incongruous alignment of Holiday cheer and finals stress, I was especially moved by Precious. My problems and pains may all be relative, yes, but how lucky am I? How lucky are you?

 

Image Credits

¹ "Marcel Duchamp and Mariah Carey play chess." Wreck and Salvage. Flickr Creative Commons. 1 Nov. 2008.

Works Cited

² Peterson, Latoya. "Precious Reactions Interesting, Infuriating." Jezebel. 02 Nov. 2009. Web. 08 Dec. 2009. <http://jezebel.com/5395444/precious-reactions-interesting-infuriating>.

³ Hirschberg, Lynn. "The Audacity of Precious." The New York Times Magazine 25 Oct. 2009. The New York Times Magazine Online. 21 Oct. 2009. Web. 8 Dec. 2009. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/magazine/25precious-t.html?pagewanted=4>.

The Function of Dysfunction

Perfect is boring. Even though this existence is something we seem to strive for as a society, this unreachable ideal really isn’t that interesting. Nobody wants to read a book, hear about, or see a movie about anyone or anything being perfect.  Perfection doesn’t breed conflict and that’s why we’re drawn towards things with discord, with problems, with issues.  That’s why the dysfunctional family has been a trope found in film:  it’s the perfect situation for conflict, and lots of it. There are the serious films dealing with family dysfunction, but a more unique breed is the comedic dysfunctional family. Two modern examples are The Royal Tenenbaums and Little Miss Sunshine, films that make us laugh at things that aren’t supposed to be funny. Though they’re both from the same family (forgive the pun), these two films address dysfunction in different ways, yet still make us laugh.

 

Family isn't a word...it's a sentence.¹

Nothing screams dysfunction more than the Tenenbaum family:  the interactions between Chas, Richie, Margot, Etheline, Royal, and the other cast of characters that make up their extended dysfunctional family can hardly be called average. We’re first introduced to the Tenenbaums as Royal is telling the children (Chas, Riche, Margot) that their mother (Etheline) is kicking him out and keeping the kids and the house. Already a broken family, each child is introduced as the prodigy they are:  Chas the businessman, Margo the playwright, Richie the tennis pro. Even though they’re a fragmented family this is the peak of the family’s success, and as the narrator says, “Virtually all brilliance of the young Tenenbaums had been erased by two decades of betrayal, failure, and disaster.” Jumping ahead those two decades the Tenenbaum kids have grown up, but have only gone downhill in the years. And when Henry Sherman (friend and business manager) proposes to Eltheline, Royal isn’t too pleased she’s planning on getting married to someone else. So Royal takes matters into his own hands, and of course doesn’t handle things in a very deft manner. When he ambushes Etheline on the street to ask to spend more time with her and the kids she of course refuses, and instead of taking no for an answer he tells her he has cancer, that he’ll be dead in six weeks. Royal’s “illness” brings the family back together, and reunited under the same roof for the first time in seventeen years. The Tenenbaums’ dysfunction is only amplified as the film continues.

One of the most apparent ways the Tenenbaums are dysfunctional is their interactions together. Speaking on the collective whole, the characters in The Royal Tenenbaums have a skewed sense of right and wrong, and this results in inappropriate behavior-a lot of it. There’s the time Chas asks Richie inappropriate questions about his suicide attempt the first time he sees him after the incident, or how Margot’s cheating on her husband with childhood friend Eli, or any of Eli’s drug-induced actions (especially crashing into the house). Royal is by far the biggest culprit of them all:  from lying about his “illness,” his condemning Margot’s first play on her 11^th birthday, picking up half the flowers he just put on his mother’s grave to Chas so he can put them on his wife’s grave.  The root of the dysfunction comes not from the Tenenbaums behaving badly, but their honest belief that their actions are morally right.

The happy family. ²

Beyond just their actions amongst each other, the clearest way the Tenenbaums’ dysfunction shines through is in their dialogue.  Much like their physical actions, their communication is wrought with inappropriate moments.  Provocative, revealing statements and moments are often followed by lines that have nothing to do with the problem at hand, or speak to such an insignificant part they’re almost non sequiturs.  When Eli and Margot break off their “relationship,” at one point Eli says to Margot “You’re in love with Richie, which is sick and gross.” After a pause, all Margot answers with is, “Do you send my mother your clippings and your grades from college?” When Richie and Margot’s husband, Raleigh St. Clair, go to a private investigator to see if Margot’s having an affair, Margot’s secret past is revealed in a fast paced montage of her life. After discovering his wife smokes and the many, many, many people she has slept with, all Raleigh can say is, “she smokes?” These seemingly off base responses demonstrate how the Tenenbaums are unable to deal with confrontation, further heightening their dysfunction.

"Wait...so most families don't wear matching tracksuits?"³

Overall, the Tenenbaums aren’t an exemplary family: they lie, have affairs, keep secrets, abuse drugs, divorce, and generally behave badly. But despite all this, the reason we can laugh with and at the Tenenbaums is their world isn’t really the one we inhabit. Yes, they’re in New York. Yes, those are streets we could drive down. Yes, we too could own Chas and Co.’s red Adidas tracksuits or Etheline’s Hermés handbag. But the Tenenbaums’ reality is most definitely a surreal one. Their personal successes of epic proportions are improbable, even if they all are the prodigies they are presented as. Their social interactions cross the realm of probability:  yes, a coked out writer could drive his sporty convertible into a brownstone, but its unlikliness coupled with everyone else’s responses crosses the line into unrealistic. Even their home is a funhouse of extremely affluent proportions. Of course, their world is meant to exist in this realm of hyper reality. The Royal Tenenbaums is told as a story, complete with narration (Alec Baldwin, what a voice), chapters, the classic opening of a book (guess the title) as the first shot of the film. We’re meant to view this as a story, as a fable, as fiction.  By lifting our expectations of realism also lifts the societal expectations of appropriate behavior on both the character’s and our behalf. So it’s okay to laugh at the Tenenbaums, because we all know this really isn’t happening.

"Everyone just pretend to be normal." ⁴

Meet the ­­­Hoovers.  There’s Sheryl, mother and head wrangler of the ­­­Hoover clan.  There’s Richard, father and motivational speaker determined that his “Nine Step Program” is revolutionary, something that will raise his family out of the economic realm they’re in. And there’s Dwayne, the teen so dedicated to getting into flight school and Friedrich Nietzsche he doesn’t speak. At all. There’s Frank too, the second highest regarded Proust scholar in the world and the newest addition to the Hoover’s. He’s staying with his sister Sheryl fresh from the hospital after a suicide attempt. Oh, and he’s gay too. Grandpa, Richard’s father, lives with them as well and besides being a heroin addict, he's a very, very perverted old man as grandfathers are often portrayed, right?   And of course there’s seven-year old Olive, youngest daughter and the adorably bespeckled second runner up to in the regional Little Miss Sunshine pageant.  But, when the winner of the regional has to forfeit her crown (something about diet pills), Olive takes the title and with it the chance to compete at the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in sunny California. So the gang all piles in the yellow Volkswagen bus for a southwestern adventure, and with all that dysfunction in one car, comedy ensues.

For the Hoovers their dysfunction lies within each character’s individual personalities. From the above synopsis above it’s easy to say no one character is even remotely like another, and we see a glimpse of how they all function in the early scenes of the movie. Around the dinner table, Dwayne sits mutely as Grandpa loudly curses the entrée. Sheryl bickers with Richard as he goes off on a rant about the Nine-Step-Program, and Olive keeps asking Frank why his wrists are all bandaged up. It’s clear there’s a level of tension between these people, a manifestation of their inability to interact with each other. Their differences and inability to accept these differences creates an incohesive family, a cornerstone of the dysfunctional family.  But Little Miss Sunshine amps up the Hoover’s dysfunction to a whole new level by sticking all six of them in the Volkswagen for an extended period of time. The proximity and length of their journey to California from New Mexico exponentially heightens their incapacity to relate and function together. Each person’s personality and characteristics becomes even more pronounced and apparent, conflicting and contrasting even more so with the others in the confines of the car. Grandpa’s inappropriate statements move to a sexual level when he advises Dwayne to “f*** a lot of women. Not just one woman. A lot of women.” Richard rants for an even more expended period about the “Nine Step Program” to his captive audience, prompting Frank to respond with the “refuge of losers,” aka sarcasm. And when Richard’s program doesn’t sell like it’s supposed to, he and Sheryl get into a full-blown screaming fight.  The Petri dish that is the yellow van intensifies the Hoover’s dysfunction, making their different personalities clash on entirely new levels.

The epitome of a happy family. ⁵

The Hoovers are no Tenenbaums. Their world is painstakingly realistic:  there’s no denying the setting of Little Miss Sunshine functions in our own world. So how come we can still laugh in the end? Little Miss Sunshine relies on situational, physical comedy much more than The Royal Tenenbaums, meaning many of our laughs come from the visual:  watching the Hoovers frantically drive back to the rest stop after they realize they’ve left Olive there, or seeing the policeman go to the back of the bus and uncover porn magazines rather than Grandpa’s dead body. While these laughs aren’t directly dysfunctional, it’s the Hoover’s dysfunction that creates these humorous situations. That’s not to say there aren’t moments that are funny because of their maladjusted nature. Objectively speaking, is sneaking Grandpa’s body out the hospital window and into the back of the car funny? Of course not:  it’s horribly morbid and a little disgusting. But the physical comedy and amplification of hyperrealism from the Hoover’s dysfunction allows some scenes, like this one, to teeter the line of believability, and their comedic aspects keep us laughing and buying the storyline. The root of Little Miss Sunshine’s comedy is in their dysfunction, but instead of us laughing at them, we laugh at the situations and reactions their maladjustment illicits.

Both the Tenenbaums and the Hovers are unquestionably dysfunctional, yet their issues and problems are vastly different so it seems they have little in common. The Tenenbaums are maladjusted in a moral sense, which causes them to act and interact in the ways they do.  The Hoover’s dysfunction comes from personality traits and their inability to connect because of their differences. Dysfunction is no laughing matter, yet both films find humor in this sadness through suspending reality, or using dysfunction as a device to create humorous situations. As Tolstoy said “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and that’s definitely the case with the Tenenbaums and the Hoovers.

 

Photo Credits:

 1. Photo from Vicky (Picasa)

2. Photo from OffOffOff

3. Photo from Photobucket

4. Photo from Beard Papa (Flickr)

5. Photo from Screenwriter's Corner

The Suburban Film: Booze, Business, and Betrayal

    Revolutionary Road struck me as disturbingly underrated, lost among an exceedingly stellar array of films released in 2008. In the first place, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio reunite for the first time since Titanic. Only this time, they actually made it to New York, the honeymoon is over, and kids are in the picture. Oddly enough car sex transcends both films. Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition), a director quite familiar with films about dysfunctional families living in the suburbs, helms this character study set in 1950s Connecticut. Frank Wheeler (DiCaprio) commutes to New York each day to work at an unnervingly standard desk job while his wife, April (Winslet), raises their two children. As with any suburban film, a great deal lies beneath the surface. April failed as an actress and, Frank needs a challenge. Intent on overcoming the mediocrity of their lives, April convinces her husband of the need for a change – the relocation of their family to Paris. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as it would seem.
    This film, though riveting in its own right, is an interesting development in a long line of suburban character studies stemming primarily from American cinema in the 1950s and ‘60s. Following an atrocious war and amidst a revitalized economy, the middle class set it sights on the American dream and, thereby, a suburban lifestyle. Films in this vein focus on the imperfections of this idealized atmosphere, culture, and way of life. Most scenes involve drinking, smoking, going to get drinks, arguing with a spouse (often while drunk), and feigning contentment for the benefit of children and friends. As a suburban film, Revolutionary Road directly examines themes and topics to which similar films at most allude. Contemplating the potential differences between this film and a suburban film actually made in the ‘50s, I came across The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
    Written and directed by Nunnally Johnson, a distinguished screenwriter, producer, and director (to a lesser extent), this film explores the emotional and fiscal strains of sustaining an urban household by working for a large corporation. A businessman, Tom Rath, commutes to Manhattan for work each day while his wife maintains their household. During the commute (between war flashbacks), Tom receives a tip about a job opening with better pay in public relations. He decides to pursue the position in light of recent financial difficulties, coming to find it much more difficult than originally expected.
    Because these two films share several key elements, their differences are astounding. Revolutionary Road examines the struggle of a married couple to break out of the norm, even by unethical means (i.e. an internal struggle). The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit considers the struggle of a married couple to maintain a family and their integrity despite an unethical corporate world and pressing emotional and financial issues (i.e. an external struggle). Specifically, the latter film focuses on the pitfalls of juggling a demanding job and family life as well as postwar society while the former centers entirely around the stifling nature of ‘50s suburban culture. The latter portrays suburban culture in a flattering light. It’s only in the process of obtaining the resources to maintain this lifestyle that problems arise. The former looks back upon a dull and monotonous way of life fostered by the culture and setting of this time period. Perhaps the distinction lies in the sum of the current cultural trends of the United States. Today’s audiences might well have found the settings of Revolutionary Road and even The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (despite its generally upbeat portrayal) dreadful in comparison. 

The Tempest Confined: Seasons of Change in "Amarcord"

Puffballs float into a tiny Italian town on a gust of wind, and they usher in spring: so begins Federico Fellini's 1973 film, Amarcord.  We are informed of this seasonal change by screaming children, whose hands are stretched towards the sky, hoping to catch spring as it falls.  We are also told by random passersby, who stop to stare as the puffballs drift to the ground.  And we are told once again by a senile old narrator, who stumbles over words he must have been saying for years, as though the prognosticating puffballs were floating down not from the sky, but from a memory half-forgotten.  The entire film, in fact, has the feel of half-remembered, half-improvised nostalgia: a year long memory of Fellini's, embroidered with his own personal brand of ridiculous.

And the film is quite often ridiculous.  From the uncle who climbs a tree and refuses to come down, to the overly sexualized daydreams of the young boys of the town, the film deals with the ordinary and makes it loud and colorful and strange.  There is Gradisca, who seemingly owns one outfit (red, of course). She features prominently in the fantasies of men and boys alike, and features even more prominently in the town's urban legends.  And yet, despite her role as town temptress, she is content to sit in an empty theater and watch Gary Cooper movies, hoping against hope that she could find a real life facsimile for her film idol.  And then there is Titta, the young boy around whom this episodic film revolves.  He argues with his father, is doted on by his mother, and lifts up the buxom cigarette girl in a display of teenage masculinity.  Titta is an obvious Fellini stand in, a character whose thought on woman and religion and the beauty of the world are only beginning to coalesce.  And these things, the women and the world, are always most beautiful in the spring, when the puffballs all.

But spring, that season of blue skies, hellos, and goodbyes, is not the only important season in the film.  There is also fall, the time when the fog comes.  It's impenetrable, and an old man stands in its midst and asks it: "Where am I?  I don't seem to be anywhere.  If death is like this, I don't think much of it."  And here, for an instant, Amarcord becomes a bit tragic.  But instead of decrying the tempest in his mind, the old man merely responds with an emphatic "Up yours!"  And with that, we are returned to Amarcord, where moments of true emotion are always undercut by the carnival of life.  But the man lost in the fog finds his home, as he was standing in front of it the entire time.  And then the camera follows the leaves blowing through the air, and finds a group of people waltzing without partners to music only they can hear, asking the question "Where are you my love?" to no one in particular. 

After fall comes winter, a time where peacocks perch on great mounds of snow and unveil their feathers.  But in the midst of this image of beauty is sadness, as Titta's mother dies shortly after.  Her funeral dirge acts as the transition between piles of snow to puffballs.  And when spring has returned, we follow the puffballs as they waft towards the wedding of the lovely Gradisca, who may have finally found her Gary Cooper.  Sadly, however, it is not that simple.  Gradisca's new husband is a fascist politician, the type of person who could irrevocably change the town's way of life.  And the threat of fascism is presented as almost a joke in the film.  Dictators take the form of overgrown cardboard clowns in this particular circus, but beneath the facade is real danger.  And the aftereffects of Italian fascism were portrayed through neorealism, a filmic movement that Fellini was a part of at the beginning of his career.  But with Amarcord, he goes back to the beginning; the world that came before the Italian people fell into poverty and tragedy.  Because before that tragedy, the only things falling were puffballs. 

"People Only Die of Love in the Cinema": Searching for the Normal in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

The very first words spoken in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg are "Is it finished?"  This question, a less than auspicious start to a film, is posed by a man to his mechanic.  The mechanic, a young man in a bright blue jumpsuit, replies: "The engine still knocks when it's cold, but that's normal."  So begins Jacques Demy's 1964 film; with this relatively normal, almost colorless exchange between the two men.  Of course, these seemingly mundane lines are sung, because every word of the film is sung.  And the seemingly mundane mechanic shop is infused with every color imaginable, because Jacques Demy turns car repair into a feat requiring Technicolor.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, however, does not deal with these Technicolor trifles with the over the top pageantry of an American musical.  There is no musical number about how much they "gotta dance!" here, and indeed, there is no dancing.  The camera is the thing that follows choreographed patterns, as the film has numerous long takes that move from one character to another without missing a beat.  In fact, the entire film is choreographed, and it is only the characters that remain almost motionless, emotionally stagnant amidst Demy's always mobile, always surprising visual splendor.  The story at the center of the film is as seemingly banal as the dialogue: a girl loves a boy, the boy goes away to war, the girl gets pregnant (of course), and the boy returns home to find that the girl isn't waiting for him.  So goes this bittersweet tale of love and loss.  But the film does not just rise above its uninspired plot: it uses its uninspired plot to explore these uninspired people who are its center.  And while their real life, provincial French counterparts may not be surrounded by pink patterned wall paper that perfectly matches their pink cardigans, their pink headbands, and their pink umbrellas, there is a fundamental melancholy to the film that belies its candy coated exterior.  And those bright colors only serve to heighten the intensity of the emotions: the two main characters, Genevieve and Guy, "je t'aime," "je t'aime," "je t'aime," so often that by any right the words ought to lose all meaning.  And yet, when set to Michel Legrand's lovely score and surrounded by the always colorful set design, their repeated proclamations reach a sort of emotional fever pitch.  So when Genevieve falls to the ground; in a faint at the merest suggestion that Guy has forgotten her, it's almost believable.  Because in this world, where a pretty, pink clad Catherine Deneuve almost fades into the pretty pink background, the visuals and the sound don't just heighten the emotions, they give them an air of verisimilitude that they would otherwise be lacking.

The last scene of the film is set in December, and it is no longer raining but snowing: there's no need for umbrellas in Cherbourg when it's December.  And it is at a gas station that Genevieve and Guy have their last meeting: her in a fur coat and mourning, him in another blue jumpsuit.  The first thing she says to him, after all of their years apart, is that it's cold.  He tells her to come into the office.  There are no declarations of love, only a sad lingering sense of what might have been.  When asked what type of gasoline she wanted to fill her car with, normal or super, Genevieve chooses super instead of normal, just like she chose fur coats over car mechanics once, a long time ago.  So it's cold, and things are fine.  They're normal, perhaps.  And yes, they are finished.  But as she drives away with her child, and his wife returns with his, we realize that maybe, even outside this world of fuchsia wall paper and pseudo operettas, normal might be alright.